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      ‘A Taste of Hunger’ Review: A Relentless Pursuit of Perfection

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      A husband and wife pour everything into their restaurant in a quest for a Michelin star, heedless of the other dimensions of their lives.In the Danish drama “A Taste of Hunger” infidelity and unyielding ambition threaten to derail the relationship between a married couple of restaurateurs.The kitchen at the heart of the Danish drama “A Taste of Hunger” has none of the warmth of home cooking or jovial dinner parties. Cold blue lights bear down on the restaurant workers as they tend to dressed oysters and fermented lemons. The restaurant, called Malus, in reference to the genus for apples, the original forbidden fruit, seems designed with a minimalism that borders on the brutal.Malus belongs to Carsten (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Maggie (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal), a married couple whose dream is to earn a Michelin star. The movie follows their romance in flashbacks, showing the early sweetness that prevailed before ambition infused their relationship with bitterness.In present-day sequences, the couple faces a crisis after a man they believe to be a Michelin critic is served a spoiled ingredient at their restaurant. Carsten is the head chef at Malus, and Maggie has fallen into a support role, raising their children and managing business. And it is Maggie who makes it her goal to track down the disappointed diner, determined to secure a second shot at a starred review. But Maggie’s quest is complicated by the emergence of Frederik (Charlie Gustafsson), a man with whom she once had an affair. Sensing the couple’s fragility, Frederik is determined to twist their crisis to his benefit.The director Christoffer Boe works to balance the story’s overripe dramatics with images that remain cool even in the heat of the moment. He shows Copenhagen’s spare architecture and the restaurant’s near-medical sterility, emphasizing the geometric order of the world that Carsten and Maggie wreak havoc upon. The effect is a movie that resembles nothing so much as the centerpiece of the Malus menu — a hot dog made with elevated ingredients.A Taste of HungerNot rated. In Danish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      The Ending of 'Fight Club' Was Censored in China

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      The 1999 cult classic starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton is not the only foreign film to be altered for audiences in mainland China.When viewers watch “Fight Club” on a popular Chinese streaming platform, most of the film looks exactly as it did when it was released in 1999 — except for the apocalyptic ending.Instead of a successful plot to destroy a series of buildings, the Chinese version of the cult classic starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton ends with a note to viewers saying that the police “rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding.”As for Pitt’s character, the note says, he was sent to an asylum and later discharged. (Never mind that the character is actually a figment of Norton’s character’s imagination.)The censored ending was discovered recently by fans in China who watched it on a streaming platform owned by Tencent, a giant Chinese entertainment company. It has led to criticism from Human Rights Watch and chatter on social media in China and the United States.“This is SUPER wonderful! Everyone gets a happy ending in China!” Chuck Palahniuk, the writer whose 1996 novel inspired the film, wrote sarcastically on Twitter. But he also said in an interview with TMZ on Wednesday that the censored ending was closer to the ending of his book, in which the bomb malfunctions and the narrator wakes up in a mental hospital after shooting himself.It is unclear whether the changes to the film’s Chinese edition were the result of self-censorship, a government order or a combination of the two. The film’s production company, based in Los Angeles, did not respond to requests for comment, and its Chinese distributor declined to comment.But this much is clear: “Fight Club” is not the first movie where the version made for the Chinese mainland audience differed from the original. Over the years, a number of Western movies and television shows — including “Men in Black 3,” “Cloud Atlas” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” — have been altered before they were shown to local audiences.A ‘reluctant compromise’To some extent, recent censorship echoes how the mainland Chinese authorities once demanded changes to movies from Hong Kong, the former British colony that was promised a high degree of autonomy when it returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.Hong Kong’s golden age of cinema included Bruce Lee kung fu films and Wong Kar-wai dramas, and, for years, local production companies there would export films to Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and other countries in the region.But when those international sales were battered by a 1997 financial crisis in East Asia, Hong Kong production houses began looking to mainland China as their main source of overseas revenue. As a price of admission, they often agreed to produce alternate versions of their movies to suit local censorship requirements.“When exploitation of the new mainland market becomes a matter of life and death, such a reluctant compromise with market entry limitations is totally understandable as a measure of expediency,” the scholar Hilary Hongjin He wrote in a 2010 study of Hong Kong cinema in the Chinese mainland.Early censorshipAn early example of such censorship is “The Inescapable Snare,” a re-edited version of “Naked Ambition,” a 2003 Hong Kong film about the local sex industry. The mainland version adds a plot twist in which Hong Kong police officers team up with Beijing’s Ministry of Public Security to crack down on pornography and prostitution.Other Hong Kong films were edited for audiences in Southeast Asia, a region where governments and film audiences tend to be socially conservative. Notably, the directors of “Infernal Affairs,” a 2002 crime drama, produced an alternate version for the Malaysian market in which a criminal who has infiltrated the Hong Kong Police Force is apprehended after murdering an undercover officer.“Liu Jianming, we have found out that you are a spy for the mafia,” a policeman tells the criminal in the alternate ending, moments after Liu kills the undercover officer in the elevator of an office tower. “You are arrested.”In the original version, Liu rides the elevator to the ground floor and leaves the building.Pro-government codasToday, Hong Kong’s world-famous film scene has become the latest form of expression to be censored, since Beijing imposed a national security law on the territory in 2020. The Hong Kong government has been cracking down on documentaries and independent productions that it fears could glamorize the pro-democracy protests that roiled the city in 2019.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘The Conductor’ Review: Seizing the Baton

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      In this biographical documentary, Marin Alsop recounts how she became the first woman to lead a major American orchestra.When Marin Alsop became the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007, she was the first woman to lead a major orchestra in the United States. Alsop, who concluded her tenure in that position last year, recounts her life in classical music in the documentary “The Conductor,” directed by Bernadette Wegenstein. Alsop’s biography is a story of continually challenging a field in which the sexist idea that women can’t conduct persists.The only child of a cellist and a violinist, Alsop recalls being a young girl and seeing Leonard Bernstein conduct; she saw his remarks to the audience as being directed straight at her. Alsop would eventually work under the mentorship of Bernstein (shown looking animated and, frankly, oblivious to the boundaries of personal space in old video) at the Tanglewood Music Center. But much of her career required taking initiative when opportunities were denied to her.She formed an all-female, mostly string swing band. (She speaks of how the demands of the genre ran counter to the perfection classical musicians aspire to.) After being rejected from Juilliard’s conducting program (she says a teacher told her she would never conduct), she founded her own orchestra. And in Baltimore, where her selection for the job originally rankled musicians, she started a music program for children.As filmmaking, “The Conductor” takes a fairly standard approach. The most engaging portions involve music-making itself. Alsop explains her ideas about Mahler. (“There’s a reason why Mahler put every single note in the piece,” she says in voice-over, as the movie shows her on a boat in Switzerland, where she likens a mist to the opening of a Mahler symphony; her job, she continues, is to understand his motivations.) Elsewhere, musicians and pupils describe Alsop’s encouraging approach.The ConductorNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘They/Them/Us’ Review: Working Out the Kinks

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      In this dramatic comedy, two divorced 40-somethings gamely experiment with B.D.S.M.It’s all too easy to turn a fetish into broad comedy — the more peculiar the fetish, the better it lends itself to glib, obvious jokes. The best thing about “They/Them/Us,” a dramatic comedy about two divorced 40-somethings wading into B.D.S.M., is that it largely resists this temptation. There are a couple of routine gags involving stuff like double-sided dildos and ill-fitting leather pants, but for the most part the movie treats bondage and discipline as ordinary, fulfilling pastimes for consenting adults. “Whatever you see, don’t laugh,” a dominatrix warns Charlie (Joey Slotnick), before he attends his first kink festival. It’s refreshing that the director Jon Sherman heeds this advice and doesn’t default to mockery around these things either.
      “They/Them/Us” finds sharp humor in more relatable friction: namely between Charlie and Lisa (Amy Hargreaves) as they attempt to reconcile their domestic responsibilities with their voracious sexual appetites. Both have teenage children from former marriages; bringing them together under one roof proves challenging, and puts a crimp in their kinky lifestyle. The children themselves are a bit underwritten, each with a defining quirk or quandary — one has a budding drug addiction, another can’t get others to respect their preferred pronouns — that give them the dimensions of sitcom characters. Charlie and Lisa, however, are more fully realized. Slotnick and Hargreaves, both underrated character actors, portray them with a rich, nuanced shading that elevates the film.They/Them/UsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘La Soga Salvation’ Review: A Very Inferior Set of Thrills

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      The sequel to the 2010 thriller “La Soga” trades the original’s pointed commentary on crime and corruption for something more generic.Arriving more than a decade after “La Soga,” a strikingly violent 2010 thriller about a hit man, Luisito (code name: La Soga), that was a rare thing — a film from the Dominican Republic that received distribution in the United States — “La Soga Salvation” is the quintessential sequel-nobody-asked-for. It’s a significant downgrade from the cliché-ridden but visually bracing first installment, transporting Luisito from the streets of his home country (much of the first film was shot in slum areas and working-class neighborhoods in and around Santiago and Baitoa) to a sterile New England town. The sequel does away with the original movie’s pointed commentary on crime and corruption in the Dominican Republic, opting for a more generic revenge-movie approach.“Salvation” was presumably a kind of passion project for Manny Perez, the writer and star of the original movie: for the sequel, Perez takes on directing duties, too, making this his feature directorial debut. The story picks up years after the events of the first film. Luisito and his girlfriend, Lía (Sarah Jorge León), live in domestic bliss, in hiding from the big baddies of the Dominican underworld — until, naturally, they’re found.A cartoonishly sinister white guy, Jimmy (Chris McGarry), shows up at the couple’s church demanding Luisito’s services to take out a cartel leader. Our hero refuses, prompting mayhem: Lía is kidnapped, and Luisito is forced to return to the way of the gun. Back on the job, he contends with miscellaneous crooks including Dani (Hada Vanessa), a leather-clad, sniper-rifle-equipped dame with a score to settle.But Perez is a flimsy leading man, and the film around him — a modest production that doesn’t exactly hide its budgetary shortcomings — is at best a borderline campy B-movie with bursts of bloody action. At worst, it’s a completely self-serious slog.La Soga: SalvationNot rated. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour and 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Clean’ Review: Taking Out the Trash

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      Adrien Brody plays a community do-gooder with a not-so-pristine past in this action film directed by Paul Solet.Adrien Brody, as Clean, the title protagonist of this movie, drives a sanitation truck with the company name Bliss on its driver-side door in the opening scene. As Clean tools through desolate semi-urban streets in the dead of winter, stopping at the junkyard to feed a wiry dog, it’s clear that right now bliss isn’t part of the man’s program.In voice-over, the character, who sports a large but well-tended beard and sees the world with wide, baleful eyes, speaks of “a sea of filth, an endless onslaught of ugliness.” Clean sounds a little like a cabby whom cinephiles became familiar with in the 1970s, no?As it happens, it’s one of the members of Clean’s 12-step group who introduces himself as Travis.It’s understandable that an actor of Brody’s upbringing (he’s a native New Yorker) and inclination might want to concoct a variant on the “Taxi Driver” character who referred to himself as “God’s lonely man.” (The actor co-wrote “Clean” with its director, Paul Solet. Brody also composed the music.)Unlike the eventually messy antihero of Martin Scorsese’s movie, Clean, seeking sober redemption after a tragic and criminal past, is actually adept at meting out violence. After practically caving in the already unlovable face of the son of a local drug kingpin, Clean is obliged to put his skills to further work rescuing a teen girl who, well, yes, reminds him of someone he lost.After teasing the audience with an arthouse-inflected diffusion of narrative for its first half, “Clean” goes full grindhouse in the second. Shot in Utica, N.Y., and boasting locations that set a high bar for starkness, “Clean” has some real craft, but doesn’t quite satisfy as it toggles between bloodbaths and bathos.CleanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Sundown’ Review: Stuck in Shallow Waters in Acapulco

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      In this Michel Franco film, a family escapes to the beach in Acapulco, the onetime sun-baked paradise that has become an epicenter of violence.Acapulco’s picturesque beauty and grimy desperation converge in writer-director Michel Franco’s psychological thriller “Sundown.” Franco teams up again here with Tim Roth who plays Neil Bennett, an heir to a United Kingdom meatpacking fortune on vacation with his wife, Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and family. The cinematographer Yves Cape delivers a steady stream of wide shots and abstract-leaning frames that constantly compel the viewer to prioritize the macro over the micro.Franco chooses to depict Acapulco from the wealthy white foreigner’s point of view, in which the lives of brown locals — the villains and Neil’s beautiful lover Berenice (Iazua Larios) alike — go unexamined. Yet Franco manages to wag a not-too-subtle finger at viewers, reminding them to check their assumptions about Neil while at the same time keeping the raison d’être of that main character utterly hidden. The result: “Sundown” lands more like a one-note thought exercise than a fully fleshed out story.Roth’s delivery isn’t the problem here; neither is the film’s slow-burn pacing nor its absence of score. Rather, the script feels thin and ill-conceived in a film that clings noticeably to the surface. Neil is nothing if not brief — the number of lines he has might add up to a paragraph in the entire film. We can barely get a good look at him; his first close-up doesn’t appear until nearly halfway through the film.Ultimately what “Sundown” is most successful at revealing to us is the look of Acapulco itself. By the end, Cape has captured how the sun strikes this spot of Pacific Coast in a dozen different ways. If only the same amount of light had been shed on any of the characters. Without that, an Acapulco sunburn is likely to elicit more feeling than “Sundown” does.SundownRated R for graphic violence, sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      He’s a Doctor. He’s an Actor. He’s an Indie Heartthrob.

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      Actors have a long history of indulging in side projects: Some use their off time to write books, while others even front rock bands. But it’s fair to say that few thespians navigate a dual career quite like Anders Danielsen Lie, who currently stars as a lingering love interest in both “Bergman Island” and “The Worst Person in the World” — an indie-film doubleheader that prompted one critic to dub him “the art house’s next great ex-boyfriend” — while still working full-time as a doctor in Oslo.“It’s been overwhelming,” Lie, 43, told me over a recent video chat, and he wasn’t kidding: In early January, he was named best supporting actor by the National Society of Film Critics even as he worked three days a week at a vaccination center in Oslo and two days a week as a general practitioner. “It feels kind of abstract because as an actor, the most important part of making a movie is the shoot itself,” he said. “Then, when the film is coming out, it’s kind of a surreal experience.”Expect things to get even more surreal as the acclaimed “The Worst Person in the World” finally makes its way into American theaters on Feb. 4. In this romantic dramedy from the director Joachim Trier, Renate Reinsve — who won the best-actress prize for the role at the Cannes Film Festival — stars as Julie, a young 20-something trying to figure out her future. For some time, she takes up with Lie’s character, Aksel, an older, charismatic comic-book artist, and adopts his settled life as her own. But even when they break up and Julie discovers new pursuits, she finds her bond with the cocksure Aksel hard to shake.Lie with Renate Reinsve in “The Worst Person in the World”Kasper Tuxen, via Sundance InstituteLie previously collaborated with Trier on the well-reviewed films “Reprise” (2008) and “Oslo, August 31” (2012), but “The Worst Person in the World” has proved to be something of a breakthrough: Already, the internet has crafted video tributes to his character, and the film has struck a chord with audiences who prefer simple, human stakes to superhuman ones. “It felt like we made a very local thing from Oslo, and we were afraid if anybody else in the world would understand,” Lie said. “But people on the other side of the planet can identify with it. That’s what is so nice about feature films, they kind of bring people together.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.With Aksel and Julie, it feels like the qualities that drew them to each other eventually drive them apart. How would you sum up their relationship?He’s good at articulating her emotions and thoughts, and that’s something she probably wanted at an earlier stage in their relationship, but at this point, she’s just annoyed by it. He’s a pretty kind person, but he is also, in a subtle way, trying to dominate her by using language as his tool, because that’s what he’s good at.Is Aksel a “bad boyfriend,” as a recent Vanity Fair article asserted?I don’t see him as a bad boyfriend at all, actually. She’s not bad; he’s not bad; they’re just human. They are put in situations where they have to make hard choices and end up feeling like the worst people in the world, but it’s not really their fault. It’s life’s fault, in a way.In the film, we watch Julie swipe between different identities, trying on new jobs, new passions. Did you act the same way at that age?I personally thought that my 20s and 30s were hard, tough years, because I spent so much time trying to figure out who I was and what to do. I still haven’t made that choice, but that doesn’t bother me so much anymore. I’m happy enough to have two kids and a wife. Maybe it’s as simple as that.When you were younger, did you feel pressure to make an ultimate choice between acting and medicine?This has been my ongoing identity crisis.Lie is the son of an actress and a doctor who “ended up being both!” he said. “I probably should go into psychoanalysis or something.”David B. Torch for The New York TimesMaybe that’s just the bifurcated life you feel most suited to.It’s definitely a bifurcated life, and sometimes it feels like an identity crisis because it’s just a lot of hustle making the calendar work out. It’s hard to combine those two occupations, and sometimes I also wonder a little bit who I am. I’m trying to think that I’m something deeper than that: I’m not the doctor or the actor, I’m someone else, and these are just roles that I go into.Your mother is an actress. Did that affect the way you regard an actor’s life?My mother is not the typical actress — she’s not a diva or anything like that. She’s a very ordinary person, and I think it’s important to have a foot in reality if you want to portray people onscreen with confidence and credibility. But I’ve grown up seeing how it is to be an actress and how it is to be a doctor, and ended up being both! I probably should go into psychoanalysis or something.Your father was a doctor. That pretty much split you right down the middle, doesn’t it?Exactly. Maybe it’s an inheritable disease.Does one career inform the other?Working as an actor has improved my communication skills as a doctor because acting is so much about listening to the other actors and trying to establish good communication, often with people that you don’t know very well, and that reminds me a little bit of working as a doctor. I meet people, often for the first time, and they present a very private problem to me, and I have to get the right information to help them. It’s a very delicate, hard communication job, actually.“I have, many times, asked myself why I keep doing this, because I’m very neurotic as a person,” Lie said. David B. Torch for The New York TimesYou made your film debut when you were 11 in a film called “Herman.” How did that come about?My mother had worked with the director, so she knew he was searching for a boy my age, and she asked if I was interested in doing an audition. I didn’t really know what I had signed up for — I was 10 years old, and it felt like just a game that we were playing. I remember when the director wanted me to do the part, he came to our house with flowers and said, “Congratulations,” and I was frightened because I realized, “Now I really have to play that role and deliver.” For the first time, I felt this anxiety of not doing a good job, the exact same feeling I can get now in front of a shoot that really matters to me. I can be scared of not rising to the occasion.After that film, you didn’t work again as an actor for 16 years.“Herman” was an overwhelming experience. I felt like I was playing with explosives. I was dealing with emotions and manipulating my psyche in a way that was kind of frightening.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More